


The Light in Me

by Mertiya



Series: Walking the Mirrors [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, M/M, Mirror Universe, Mirrors, References to Suicide, Sort of mirror universe, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-17
Updated: 2013-02-17
Packaged: 2017-11-29 14:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/688090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock watches John from behind glass, searching for a way to reach him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Light in Me

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I had to write this because it was eating me and it's now 5 in the bloody morning so please excuse any problems that arise from being non-beta'ed or britpicked or, well, written at 5 in the morning. I'll try to edit later if I'm not too exhausted.

_All I want is to be your harbor; the light in me will guide you home—Harbor, Vienna Teng._

 

            It was lonely behind the mirrors.  If anyone had told Sherlock, a year ago, that he would ever want to have someone else around, he would have laughed at them.  A month ago, he would have conceded (to himself at least), that he wanted John around, at least part of the time.  But even then, he would never have thought he’d be so desperate for human contact he would have wished he had not killed Sebastian Moran.  He wouldn’t have been able to kill him if it hadn’t been for the mirrors.  But Moran was disoriented from his trip inside, and Sherlock had a gun.

            It was easy.

            He didn’t realize until a week later that he had killed three people, and even a week later, it didn’t seem to matter.  All that mattered was that he was a ghost, a shadow (and even that wouldn’t have mattered, if it hadn’t cut him off from John).  He had tried to get back, of course; he wouldn’t simply trust Mycroft’s word about something so important, but the mirrors felt solid to him now, just glass.  He had spent hours feeling for a crack, a break, anything, but there was nothing.  He was stuck.

            He spent a great deal of time flitting from mirror to mirror.  At first, he observed everything, trying to distract himself from the emptiness around him, but eventually, he found himself unable to concentrate on anything (because there was hardly a point, was there?  He could deduce the solutions to cases forever, if he liked, but he would never be able to materially affect anything again).  He debated trying to interact with Mycroft, but he couldn’t stand the thought of waiting around until Mycroft happened to step through the mirrors, and he couldn’t stand the thought of Mycroft’s understated pity, either, so he eventually busied himself with avoiding any other mirror-travelers, which simply made the loneliness worse.

            He didn’t need to eat or sleep.  He had never _wanted_ to eat or sleep before, but now he felt that he would do anything to break the monotony of wandering through empty rooms and staring at people through panes of glass.  Most of his time he spent watching over John, now, hoping that somehow John Watson would tie him to life, now that he’d been severed from it.  But John himself was cut adrift, floating anchorless on a sea of loss.  Of course, he thought Sherlock was dead (and he was close enough to right), but Sherlock could not have imagined how deeply it would affect him.

            He spent long, dark hours at night, crouched in the mirror behind the bathroom at Baker Street, because it was the closest room to John’s that had a mirror (why couldn’t John be a vainer person?  Why couldn’t he have a mirror in his bedroom?  If he ever had a chance, he would remedy that; he would surround John with mirrors to remind him of what an amazing person he was.)  He could hear John’s shouts when he had nightmares (far too often); he could even see him when he staggered into the bathroom to splash water across his face, turned thin and haggard with lack of sleep.

            For the first time, he felt that he was intruding; that he was not welcome in John’s private grief (which was ridiculous, because John was grieving over _him_ ; who could possibly be welcome, if not him?)  His attempts to reach out to John only made things worse.  Unsurprisingly, John thought he was going insane when he started seeing Sherlock in his mirrors, and Sherlock withdrew as much as he could, not wanting to be troublesome (a strangely new feeling for him). 

            He couldn’t help the night in the steam, though.  He was lightheaded with loneliness; he felt he would explode if he couldn’t let John know, somehow, and the steam appeared on both sides of the glass.  When he watched John’s face crumple, though; when he watched John sink to the ground, sobbing—he had to cover his ears not to hear the sound of John’s sobs, because they were agonizing to him.  Far more painful than any wound he had ever felt.  Was this sentiment?  Every sound John made, every half-stifled choking sob, was like an arrow to his heart, but he refused to leave.  He deserved to hear this; this was his fault.  His fault, for not being fast enough, for letting himself fall in love with John but never saying so (and he was in love with John; and, as was becoming agonizingly apparent, John was—or had been—in love with him).

            Sherlock curled in on himself for a long time; after John had gone back to bed, he pounded against the glass for hours, but it was unyielding, and he was afraid of breaking one of his only windows to John. 

            He was a wraith; he was a ghost.  He was nothing, a miserable shadow who was slowly losing his mind (as he knew, as it was quite obvious, that John believed that he was as well).  After watching John break down, he felt the need to break things himself, and after John had stumbled out of the bathroom, Sherlock snatched up a curtain rod and began to swing, reveling in the smash and clatter of breaking glass and porcelain, the flying sharp shards that gouged out tiny divots of flesh, flying and buzzing by like so many angry bees.

            The only thing he didn’t go near was the mirror itself, and eventually, he flung himself to the floor in front of it, breathing heavily.  Breathing painfully.  His throat ached, and his head ached, and his eyes…his eyes.  He had never known that crying could feel like this, this raw, aching, desperation, this clawing emptiness.  He had cried before, generally when he was a young child, but not often, and never, ever like this, never surrounded by empty nothingness (which slowly built itself back up around him, because things could not stay broken in the mirror-realm, tied as it was to the real world), unable to affect anything, unable to break what he wanted to break, unable to mend anything at all.

            He didn’t sleep, because he couldn’t sleep, but eventually, after a long time, he drifted away somewhere that wasn’t here, and he left himself behind for a time.

~

            He didn’t know how long it was before he was aware again.  He had the vague sense that John had come in and out a number of times, but he didn’t know if it was over the course of several nights, or whether John was just sleeping poorly.  All he knew was that, suddenly, John was speaking to him.

            No, not to him.  Or rather, yes, to him, but without any idea that Sherlock was there or could hear him, clearly.  Both of John’s hands were clenched on the rim of the sink, and he was hunched over.  In the white lights of the bathroom, his hair looked bleached, white, and the stark lighting brought out the lines of his face.  He looked, to Sherlock’s shock, _old_ , an illusion that was only enhanced by the stooped posture of the rounded shoulders, and the trembling in his muscles as he tightened them, apparently trying to hold himself up.

            “Sherlock,” he blurted, and his voice didn’t sound like John at all.

            “John…” Sherlock breathed.

            John didn’t hear him, of course, but he had paused, and the pause gave them the illusion of conversing, which felt, Sherlock noted, painful and reassuring at the same time.

            John swallowed.  “I think I’m going a bit mad,” he said.  “I keep seeing you everywhere, out of the corner of my eye.  And, well, that’s OK.  But I can’t actually do this, Sherlock.”

            “What do you mean?  Of course you can do…this.”  Whatever _this_ was.  It didn’t matter, because this was John, and he could do anything.

            John’s voice sounded flat and reasonable and almost cheerful, as if he were explaining to Sherlock why normal human beings actually ate and slept part of the time.  But his hands were still holding so tightly to the sink that the muscles of his upper arms were trembling.

            “I can’t move,” he said.  “I can’t stop thinking that there must have been something I could have done.  Something I should have done better.  But it’s a bit worse than that.  I suppose you’d think it’s stupid.  Sentiment, right?”  He smiled fondly, and Sherlock reached a hand toward him, completely captivated.  “I think I’ve been in love with you for a while now, Sherlock, and I can’t seem to let go of you.  Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let go of you.”

            He took a deep breath and glanced around, as if making sure no one was watching him, then reached beneath the line of Sherlock’s sight, presumably into the pocket of his robe, and laid his pistol gently on the counter.  “So.  Um, this is my note.”

            Sherlock’s heart stopped (a strange sensation, noted the part of his mind that always ticked away beneath the others, continuing to analyze even while the rest of it was—gone, eroded away beneath the sudden flood of terror).

            “And yeah, if you could actually see me saying this, I suppose this would be a little bit cruel, but I’m also kind of pissed off at you, honestly.”

            “No, John, don’t, John, I’m right here, John!”  Sherlock stood up, all of the words coming out in a rush of air, but he knew it wasn’t going to work; he was just a reflection, and all that John would see was the same shadow that had dogged him for days now.

            “John, _please_.”  He did not recognize his own voice, and John didn’t seem to see him through the glass, through that damned glass.  His brain, his treacherous, analytical brain, had already flipped the switch and flung time forward to a room full of blood and spattered shards of brain around the sack of meat that had been John Watson.

            John was holding the gun in his mercilessly steady hands, turning it over and over.  Sherlock was trapped, darkness and cold all around, and he knew—he could see what would happen if John died, the world outside turned as cold and dark as the world inside, and Sherlock would go truly mad, a ghost stalking through the hallways between the spaces, perhaps preying on anyone foolish enough to set foot into the reflective corridors, the monster in the mirror.

            And worse.  There would be no John.  A world without John was not acceptable.  A broken universe was infinitely more palatable.

            As John raised the gun to his (right) temple, Sherlock brushed aside the rules of the universe, which, really, were quite unimportant compared to the man in front of him, and he stood and slid through the mirror, trailing dust and cobwebs, and he closed his hand around the pistol and gently, very gently, turned it away.  “John,” he said.  “Please.  Point it at something less valuable.”

            John’s mouth opened very slightly, and then he shook his head a little, and he put the gun down ( _thank God_!).  “Sherlock,” he said slowly.  “God, I hope, I hope I’m not crazy.  Am I crazy?”

            Sherlock bent over him and kissed him.  “Probably,” he said.  “I think I may have just broken the universe.  Some side-effects are to be expected.”

            “Oh God,” John said.  “I don’t care.”

            The kiss turned bruising-fierce as he shoved Sherlock back against the bathroom counter.  “You maniac,” he whispered.  “I don’t care how you did it, but you did it.  One more…one more miracle, you bloody bastard, you _did_ it.”

            As the mirror-dust-coated clothes Sherlock was still wearing began to come off (and quite rapidly), he reflected (with the part of his mind not occupied by how well his doctor could kiss, and how very much he wanted him right now _oh God yes John just like that please_ ) that perhaps there were certain universal laws that even Mycroft Holmes was not aware of.           

 


End file.
